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Quantifying Urban Tree Canopy in the City of Santa Cruz

Sustainability Problem and Proposed Solution:

Understanding the distribution of tree canopy change can inform where tree planting, growth, death, and removal is occurring relative to different communities. By locating areas where there has been little or no growth we can better direct future planting projects. The outcome of this project will result in repopulating the urban canopy by focusing on canopy deficit areas, which we believe coincides with areas where low-income residents live in Santa Cruz.

Email Erik (enlowe@ucsc.edu) for information on getting involved in this project. Ideal partners will have experience in GIS and remote-sensing.

Funding Sources:

UCSC Carbon Fund

City of Santa Cruz

Project Description:

By developing Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) algorithms, we can gain a detailed "view" of the landscape and accurately quantify the Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) in Santa Cruz. Initially, these results will provide a baseline quantification of the UTC in which all subsequent analyses (2-year interval) will be compared to. These results will inform how the City implements future planting projects and help them achieve their Climate Action Milestone of a 10% UTC increase by 2020. By April 2017 (tentatively), we will have estimations for the years of 2010, 2012, 2014. Additionally, a community level analysis will be performed which will investigate the spatial distribution of UTC relative to different demographics. By June 2017, a final report will be delivered to the Carbon Fund and data layers will be compiled into the City's GIS database.

Metrics for Success:

Success will be measured based on the accuracy of our derived Urban Tree Canopy estimations. Accuracy will be assessed by comparing OBIA results to hand-digitized quantifications.